The present paper belongs to the stream of the verbal prefixation contrastive studies. It aims at conducting a short investigation of French verbs prefixed by sur- and their Polish equivalents found in the “Great French-Polish Dictionary”. In the first part, selected theoretical approaches concerning the French prefix sur- are presented, with particular attention to the semantic-based theories by Danny Amiot and Kristel Van Goethem. The second part focuses on the results of the contrastive French-Polish analysis of 48 verbs distributed into 9 semantic categories: excess, intensity, repetition, posteriority, simultaneity, spatial superiority, hierarchical superiority, notional uses, and lexicalized uses. The goal is to show what linguistic means (grammatical and/or lexical) the Polish language utilizes to express different semantic values conveyed by the French prefix sur- in each of the listed categories. Consequently, the Polish equivalents are divided into several classes, of which the most relevant are: verbs prefixed by prze- and do-, prepositional constructions (with the prepositions na and nad), and periphrastic adverbial constructions.